Waste materials from rice-husking mills in the Mekong River Delta are to be used as fuel for power plants in future, opening a new source of power generation.
The Energy Conservation Research and Development Centre has recently submitted a proposal for the construction of two rice husk-fuelled power plants to the People’s Committee of Can Tho city. Rice husking mills in the delta discharge about 3.7 million tonnes of husks each year, with Can Tho city alone dumping 240,000 tonnes.
“This is a profuse fuel source for power plants, because each plant requires only two kilos of rice husks to generate one KW,” the project’s technical consultant Tran Quang Cu said.
He added that unit prices on electricity could be as low as VND300 per KWh, depending on the cost of rice husks. However, he said the cost of construction for the plant is higher than that of a coal-fuelled power plant due to the requirement for specialised equipment. The two plants are expected to cost a combined $9.6 million and will take 18 months to build.
According to Cu, the plants would generate power to run machines that steam-dry rice paddy, a method widely used in modern husking mills in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Traditionally, coal-fuelled or solar dryers have been used, but steam dryers protect the quality of the rice. At the moment, the investor was working with the Can Tho People’s Committee for approval of the project, Cu said. However, he did not reveal the name of the investor.
The two plants, each covering two ha and generating a total of 18,500-35,600 MWh a year, are scheduled to be built in the Co Do and Thot Not districts where 32 rice-husking mills are operating with the total daily capacity of around 3,000 tonnes of rice. Cu said if the project is successful, it would be expanded in future.
“In the Mekong Delta river, there are around a dozen places that are suitable to build these power plants,” he said. Each year, Vietnam consumes 400kWh per capita, but the demand for power is growing at a rate of 10-15 per cent per annum, and national grid demand could reach 2,000kWh per capita by 2020.
To meet projected shortfalls in supply the government has resorted to purchasing power from China and other foreign owned power stations.